A year in Spain!

Tag Archives: self help

I was all ready to hit publish on this post and Mike, who thankfully is my editor said that it was boring and it needed more if I wanted to expand my audience. “More what?” I asked. “Well you could start with some gross pictures!” Read on…

I was a little scared…

For the past 3 months I have been watching a ganglion cyst on my left wrist grow. As a gynecologist the wrist is pretty far from my specialty but I recognized the cyst and knew it was nothing dangerous. Nevertheless, a growth on the body is a bit disconcerting. It started the size of a small pea on my inner wrist and grew into a large lump that got in the way of my watch. It also hurt.

A Ganglion Cyst that looks just like mine (from google images) I didn’t think of taking a picture of mine until it was gone!

I had initially intended to just leave it alone until we got back to California but in the end it became too bothersome to ignore. As I moaned and groaned more and more Mike finally said, “Do you want me to be your doctor or do you want me to just continue to be an empathetic husband?” I finally agreed that if he could come up with a solution I would agree to be a compliant patient.

A ganglion cyst is a cyst of the tendon of the hand or foot. They are relatively common and when I showed it to 2 running friends in Spain they both told me that they each had also had one but in both cases the cysts had eventually gone away spontaneously. Doctors refer to ganglion cysts jokingly as “Bible cysts”. Years ago people would just smack them with the biggest book that they had around. Presumably they also said a little prayer and wham, the cyst was history. Mike had been offering to whack my cyst for months. We do have private medical insurance here so I could go to a Spanish doctor but I was willing to let Dr. Mike come up with a plan first. Like most patients of the 21st century we looked to Google for our ideas. First we found a hysterical website called “imperfectlyhealthy.com” that recommends that one eat red clay to dissolve the cysts. No joke, I cut and pasted this from their website!

Is there a refund / guarantee if my cyst does not dissolve?
The clay is beautiful for all that it does for the body – and we are always hopeful that you will have the same results as many others – and be able to avoid surgery. We are unable to refund open containers and there is no guarantee your ganglion cyst will dissolve.

Red clay. Encyclopedias are beautiful too!

We then found one guy who cured himself with an Ace Bandage and an eraser (or a “rubber” as our English friends say).

Bandage and an eraser

He placed an eraser (roughly the size of the cyst) over the cyst and then wrapped an Ace Bandage around his wrist. He was able to sleep with this contraption on his wrist and voila, in the morning his cyst was gone. I wasn’t interested in eating any beautiful red clay so I borrowed an eraser from the girls and bought a wrist wrap from the local farmacia. Last night I placed the eraser over my growth and wrapped it as tightly as I could. I am not sure what the guy on the internet drugged himself with, but an eraser pressing on a tender cyst is hard to ignore. I probably tolerated it for an hour before I took it off. In the morning Mike said he was disappointed that I couldn’t be more compliant and I agreed to move to plan B.

We also read that we could aspirate my cyst…

ouch!

Surgery, of course was also an option.

Yikes! Mike said gross pictures are popular…

…

eww! Are surgeons allowed to say that? Yes, if they are on a year long vacation!

So what if Mike had never operated on the wrist before and we didn’t have a scalpel? We did have some non-sterile stuff and we could buy some betadine and steri strips!

How hard could it be? The Bible was looking better and better!

I pressed on my bump all day hoping that I could just make it disappear with some gentle pressure but I only managed to make it more sore. By evening I was ready to be done. Strangely, our apartment came with a set of Spanish Encyclopedias but no Bible. Mike selected “N” which was good sized.

Bye-bye cyst!

We bent my wrist over the edge of an armchair. Savvy held my fingers down and I looked away. One quick smack and wow! It deflated. I wrapped it back in the Ace Bandage and as I type this blog it seems to be gone. Thanks to my dear husband, the gynecologist with an encyclopedia, I am now cyst free.

And now since I paid to upgrade my blog to include videos here is a random Savvy video for your entertainment!